NREL Conduit Blog

This blog post covers a recent report from NREL on how jurisdictions that aim to reduce building emissions and increase energy efficiency can prepare for a building stock analysis.

Pairing solar-plus-storage with net metering has received minimal policy attention to-date because energy storage has, until recently, seen limited deployment. While this policy question may seem obscure, it is starting to pop up in other states as pairing energy storage with solar energy systems becomes more economical.

Last week, two members of NREL's Solar Technical Assistance Team—Liz Doris and I—had the opportunity to travel to Jamaica to discuss the country's net billing program with a variety of stakeholders. Our work under this project is being funded by the State Department’s United States Agency for International Development (USAID), but we were able to draw extensively upon our experience supporting state and local governments through STAT.

Under U.S. law, individual states can evaluate and modify interconnection and net metering policies and regulations based on changes in technology. Due to the increasing complexity of new photovoltaic (PV) technologies, one of the most popular requests received by NREL's Solar Technical Assistance Team (STAT) is for help with understanding and evaluating solar interconnection and net metering policy options.

Most states have implemented net energy metering (NEM) policies to value the contributions of distributed generation photovoltaics (DGPV) to the electricity grid.

The benefits and costs of distributed generation photovoltaics (DGPV) has become a trending topic among solar renewable energy professionals and policymakers. Currently, several jurisdictions are trying to develop a method for valuing solar while other locations are trying to determine the fairness of net energy metering (NEM) policies based on the benefits and costs of solar. Almost everyone agrees that this is not an easy question.

This is the first blog in a four-part series of articles in which we discuss either the valuation of solar to the grid and various stakeholders or value-of-solar (VOS) tariffs and policies.